Excerpt from This Angel on My Chest by Leslie Pietrzyk, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He continued: "But inside, you're soft and creamy. Luscious, just like a perfectly ripe avocado. That's the part of you I get. And underneath that is the hardest, strongest core of anyone I know. Like how you were today at the vet. Like how you are with everything. An avocado."

At the time, you smiled and mumbled, but could only think about the dog, the poor dog. That was five years ago. What you remember now is not so much the dog's tongue but being compared to an avocado.

THREE

He predicted a grand slam at a baseball game. It was the Orioles versus the Red Sox, a sellout game up in Baltimore, on a bright, sunny June day, the kind of day when you look out the window and think, Baseball. But in Baltimore it wasn't possible to go to a game just because it was a sunny day; they were sold out months and months in advance—especially against teams like Boston, which had fans whose fathers had been Red Sox fans, whose kids were Red Sox fans, and whose grandkids would be Red Sox fans. He'd actually bought the tickets way back in December, not knowing what kind of day it would be, and it just happened to be that perfect kind of baseball day.

He'd grown up listening to games on the radio, sprawled sideways across his bed in the dark listening to A.M. stations from faraway Chicago, New York, St. Louis. He still remembered the call letters and could reel them off like a secret code. Now he brought his radio to the game in Baltimore and balanced it on the armrest between your seats, and the announcers' voices drifted up in bits and snatches, and part of him was sitting next to you eating a hot dog and cheering and part of him was that child sprawled in the dark listening to distant voices.

The bases were loaded, and Cal Ripken came up to bat. Cal was your favorite player. You'd once seen him pick up a piece of litter that was blowing around the field and tuck it into his back pocket. Something about that impressed you as much as all those consecutive games he'd played.

"What's Cal going to do?" he asked.

You looked at your score card. (He'd taught you how to keep score; you liked the organization and had developed a special system, with filled-in diamonds for home runs, a K for a strikeout, and squiggly lines to indicate a pitching change.) Cal wasn't batting especially well lately—the beginnings of a slump, you thought. "Hit into a double play," you said. Cal had hit into a lot of double plays that season, ended a lot of innings.

He shook his head. "He's knocking the grand salami"—meaning a home run bringing in all four runners. You'd never seen one in person before.

"Cal doesn't have many grand slams," you said—not to be mean (after all, Cal was your favorite player), but because it was true. You knew Cal's stats, and his grand-slam total was four at the time, after all those years in the majors.

"Well, he's getting one now," he said.

After Cal fouled twice for two strikes, you glanced over at him. "It'll come," he said.

On the next pitch, Cal whacked the ball all the way across that blue sky.

Everyone stood and cheered and screamed and stomped their feet, and he held the radio in his hand and flung his arm around your shoulders and squeezed tight. From the radio by your ear, you heard the echo of everyone cheering, and you thought about a boy alone in the dark listening to that sound.

FOUR

He was afraid of bugs: outdoor bugs and indoor bugs; bugs big enough to cast shadows and little bugs that could be pieces of lint. Not "afraid" as in running screaming from the room, but "afraid" as in watching TV and pretending not to see the fat cricket in the corner or walking into the bathroom first thing in the morning and ignoring the spider frantically zigzagging across the sink.

Excerpted from This Angel on My Chest by Leslie Pietrzyk. Copyright © 2015 by Leslie Pietrzyk. Excerpted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.